The design and manufacture of safes have extended over many years in the past and have included many novel features. Improvements in the quality and versatility of hand tools have permitted thieves to break into safes that were considered to be tamperproof and accordingly improvements in safes have been necessary to stay beyond the capabilities of the thief.
Most safes, regardless of their size, include a combination lock encased in a heavy steel door and operating to extend or retract a plurality of sliding bolts from the door into matching recesses in the door casing to lock or unlock the door to the casing. Two frequently used methods for tampering with a safe have been to smash the combination lock mechanism by hammering on the dial and by selectively drilling through the door to destroy components of the locking mechanism. On extremely large safes, such as those found in banks, the door can be made thick enough to thwart any attempt at using a hand drill to pierce the door and the combination mechanism can be made sufficiently sturdy to withstand repeated hammering. Small safes, however, which are mounted in a wall or a floor of a room must be small enough to be opened and manipulated by a person and this limitation will not permit the use of extremely thick sections of doors and walls, nor will it permit the use of sturdy combination lock dials that can be employed in larger safes. Accordingly, it has been necessary to resort to other means for providing better protection against tampering by thieves. It is an object of this invention to provide those improvements.